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That was because I liked you
From its one-line summary on TCM, I thought Jacques Feyder's Knight Without Armour (1937) was going to be a spy story. I really don't see what else I could have been expected to construe from "A British spy tries to get a countess out of the new Soviet Union." In fact it's a romantic epic of the Russian Civil War that could be happily double-featured with Dr. Zhivago (1965); it stars Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich and as with many movies I watch effectively cold, what I was vaguely expecting would have been much less interesting than what I got.
It is technically true, for example, that Donat plays a British spy, but only for a few weeks in 1914—with his passport revoked after one of his articles cuts too close to the Imperial bone, a job offered by the local representative of the Secret Service Bureau is the only chance that British-born, St. Petersburg-based journalist and translator A.J. Fothergill can find to stay in his beloved Russia. Assigned the identity of a politically concerned student and introduced to a revolutionary cell, he's just supposed to observe and report, but when the most hot-headed of his fellow students decides to take direct action into his own hands, "Peter Ouranoff" is rolled up along with the rest of the radicals and packed off to Siberia. Three years pass in the "frozen hell" of the katorga system, hard labor and six-month nights mitigated only by the friendship of his old comrade Axelstein (Basil Gill). The Revolution brings them home as heroes—Axelstein is immediately promoted Commissar of Khalinsk and insists on Peter as his right-hand man—but there's something haunted and closed-off in this beautiful man now, hard-bitten as he looks in his leather jacket, his cavalryman's boots, his worker's cap. His first task is to escort a woman to Petrograd, he doesn't know to what end and he doesn't ask, and so complete is his break with his previous self that I still can't tell if he recognizes her from the time they brushed past one another on a train in England, another world ago. "I have my orders and I must obey them. And it's better that you should obey them, too." She is the Countess Alexandra Adraxine née Vladinoff (Dietrich), a government minister's brilliant daughter married to a military fool who left her widowed within weeks of war's outbreak; we have been tracing her glittering life in parallel with Peter's troubles, her presentation at court, her wedding, the luxuries of her husband's estate where she awakes one eerie autumn morning to discover its opulent halls and stairs and lawns as still and deserted as a museum, as if time has moved on and left her like a snow-ghost of empire in its wake, at least until the peasants with rifles and pitchforks arrive. She's shell-shocked, Peter's under glass. Neither of them is who they used to be. The viewer may expect them to fall in love, thrown together by the lawlessness of their journey which begins with an absence of trains and goes on to include hiding under leaves, changing uniforms with the dead, and riding the rails with crowds of the dispossessed; I did not expect the turn of the countess and the revolutionary becoming refugees, fleeing the chaos of Red and White Armies equally in hopes of just making it out of the country they loved alive. If the prevailing genre around them is romance, their chances aren't dreadful, but history—Russian history not excepted—is more equivocal.
Knight Without Armour began life as a novel by James Hilton, published like his best-seller Lost Horizon in 1933; its film adaptation was produced by Alexander Korda, scripted in turn by Frances Marion, Lajos Biró, and Arthur Wimperis, and lyrically photographed by Harry Stradling; in other words I do not believe anyone actually Russian was involved in the production unless you count Miklós Rózsa's incorporation of themes from Tchaikovsky into the score. It is an English vision of Russian history through a filter of French poetic realism. I was struck nonetheless by its even-handedness which doesn't feel like a cop-out. Especially with the attractive Alexandra as co-protagonist, it would be easy to play the Bolsheviks as a jumped-up bloodthirsty mob, all sympathy for the aristos and none for the workers of the world. After all, the White Russians had the émigré glamour in the West; the Reds were the bomb-throwers, the rabble-rousers, and they had no sense of humor to boot. (The Green Army, the Black Guards, and other factions of the civil war collectively feature as Sir Not Appearing in This Film.) When we finally meet an enclave of White soldiers, however genteelly their officers may dress and speak, they register almost as caricatures of callous nobility, toasting the daughter of General Vladinoff with champagne while outside the eager staccato of a machine gun chews its way through another line of Red prisoners, cursorily tried and condemned with the exact boredom of the Bolsheviks who will retake the town in a day or so and stand their own, White prisoners up against the wall. The uniforms change on the soldiers in the town square, but the music they play to entertain themselves barely does. "Shall I tell you a great secret?" a drunken delegate (Miles Malleson) confides to Peter. "Soldiers are soldiers. White or Red, there's no difference. They can order you about, but what can they do? Shoot, kill, destroy!" There is an ironically double-edged quality to the alliance, then romance between Alexandra and Peter: they can shelter safely with neither side. I suppose it saves the film from ultimately having to pick a side, even symbolically, but I feel all the same that it gives a slight advantage to the Reds. Peter originally got in trouble for criticizing the Tsarist state, don't forget, and that was before his Bolshevik days. Axelstein who ran what that state viewed as a terrorist cell makes an honest and responsible commissar, actively opposed to wanton destruction and executions on his watch. Alexandra is our sole argument for the Whites and returning her to her ostensible people does nothing but make her realize how much more she trusts the assistant commissar of Khalinsk who sat all night with her in a deserted train station patrolled by a war-maddened stationmaster swinging his lantern at invisible, imaginary trains ("Trains that are seen are being blown up") and recited Browning's "Prospice" in his hushed lift of a voice when she couldn't sleep. For the record, although he admits to an Oxford education, Peter never does reclaim his British identity; it's a gun Chekhov threw in the river. It's one of the unexpected elements that makes me like the movie far more than I usually like romances, although it does not hurt that Donat and Dietrich have spellbinding chemistry, all the more effective because it builds through mutual kindness and life-saving that finally flashes over to breathless tenderness: "Were you thinking—that I wouldn't come back—for you?"
It is also possible that I am writing about this film because of John Clements, who steals his eleven o'clock scenes so hard that while his screentime totals perhaps fifteen minutes, I don't blame the movie for shipping him with both protagonists for most of it. Previously I had seen the actor only in The Four Feathers (1939), where I enjoyed but am beginning to think I underrated him. Behind his makeshift desk at the train station at Kazan, he looks like just another young fanatic hunting counterrevolutionaries in his black leather coat and his СССР armband; it is curious that he seems to permit our protagonists to advance their lie of traveling as siblings when his older, more cynically eager partner pushes for their arrest—White sympathizers and unaffiliated bourgeoisie are being executed within earshot as they speak—but he can't be all that careless when he insists on escorting them personally to the authorities in Samara, a full day's journey starting at night. In the rattling privacy of the train compartment, with his soldier's astrakhan hat pulled off and some of his official, impersonal authority with it, he has dark curling hair and a thin elastic face that ridges up on both sides when he smiles; it is a swift and shyly sly smile, as gravely daring as a flirtation. "There can never be truth without trust," he observes. "You, for instance, don't trust me. Obviously not." Modestly, he gives them the upper hand, acknowledging his collusion in their pretense without requiring them to confirm it; he busies himself rolling a cigarette and then with a lick of the paper glances suddenly, boldly from Alexandra's face to Peter's. Last night in a swaying slice of windowlight he watched the supposed brother chastely, passionately kiss his supposed sister's hand. "Don't let's admit anything. I don't really care who you are." Some hours and a veritable picnic of tinned foods and brandy later, everyone is sprawled around the compartment and it is becoming clear that whatever else brisk, droll, absurdly young Commissar Poushkoff may be, he's fragile. Far from a collective cog in the Revolution machine, he is exactly the sort of sensitive, highly strung individual who decorated the romantic novels of nineteenth-century Russia, and he's heading for exactly their sort of crack-up. Perhaps it's the shock of Alexandra's beauty, which is after all as sharply ethereal as Dietrich's own; perhaps it's the intimacy between her and Peter, so deep and so easy that they don't even need to touch to be in communion; perhaps he just couldn't take another day of having frightened, ordinary strangers dragged out behind the train station and shot for knowing the wrong people or having the wrong job. Either way, in a desperately gauche and touching gesture he does not quite manage to kiss Alexandra's hand and collapses in convulsive sobs, hoarse and racking as if his heart's being pulled up by the roots. At her concerned touch, he tries to pull himself together, gasping with excruciating correctness, "I most humbly beg your pardon. I don't know what you must think of me, behaving like this. The brandy—I'm not used to it—" but Alexandra's already soothing his hair with one hand and the next minute Peter has joined them, laying a steady hand of his own on the commissar's shaking shoulder. "It's quite understandable," he says gently. "We've all been through a great strain." And the scene fades out on the two of them all but curled around the young commissar who presses his mouth to Alexandra's hand as she caresses his hair and Peter holds them both and I am sorry, my slash goggles are only marginally more evolved than my gaydar and even I think the film wouldn't kick all three of them out of bed for eating crackers. That evening in Samara, he talks inconsequentially of the attractions of the region and then shows them a way out, which he cannot follow. I have gathered that the British moviegoing public of eighty years ago was as struck by Clements' performance as I was. I hope I have done my part to ensure his appreciation in the present day.
I don't say that this movie is flawless. It takes off once Donat and Dietrich are sharing a screen, but it needs a map and a flashlight to find its way out of the first act and after taking its legitimately epic time through several cataclysms of the early twentieth century it ends as suddenly as if its director realized he was making a pre-Code. I am unconvinced that some of Alexandra's costumes were the height of fashion in 1917 as opposed to 1937 and while in general I approve of actors using their native accents in foreign settings, there's one scene near the end where it might actually make a difference what language they're speaking and Knight Without Armour's English-only policy means I can't tell. I should also admit that it took me more of the film than I would have liked to get used to Feyder's directing style, which seems to favor short scenes that layer together to delicate, then sweeping effect; it's not really choppy, but it can feel that way until sufficient critical mass has been attained. It caught me anyway. It's a beautifully crowded and intimate film, a kind of hallucinatory travelogue with dirt and dust on its face; I believe its romance and I believe the reawakening that's part of it and I am sure that more politically acute films have been made about the Russian Civil War, but this one reminded me occasionally of short stories by Mikhail Bulgakov, so it must have done something right. It catches the surging bewilderment of a country in day-to-day, if not minute-to-minute upheaval, and never loses sight of the human faces its camera snags on, a documentary illusion that lends its crowd scenes specificity as well as scale. (There is one scene involving the stopping of a train that I almost can't believe David Lean didn't steal.) Dietrich is human-sized and no less luminous for it, Donat looks startlingly good in an ushanka, if anyone ever filmed Clements reading the phone book I am probably about to try to track it down. This metamorphosis brought to you by my revolutionary backers at Patreon.
It is technically true, for example, that Donat plays a British spy, but only for a few weeks in 1914—with his passport revoked after one of his articles cuts too close to the Imperial bone, a job offered by the local representative of the Secret Service Bureau is the only chance that British-born, St. Petersburg-based journalist and translator A.J. Fothergill can find to stay in his beloved Russia. Assigned the identity of a politically concerned student and introduced to a revolutionary cell, he's just supposed to observe and report, but when the most hot-headed of his fellow students decides to take direct action into his own hands, "Peter Ouranoff" is rolled up along with the rest of the radicals and packed off to Siberia. Three years pass in the "frozen hell" of the katorga system, hard labor and six-month nights mitigated only by the friendship of his old comrade Axelstein (Basil Gill). The Revolution brings them home as heroes—Axelstein is immediately promoted Commissar of Khalinsk and insists on Peter as his right-hand man—but there's something haunted and closed-off in this beautiful man now, hard-bitten as he looks in his leather jacket, his cavalryman's boots, his worker's cap. His first task is to escort a woman to Petrograd, he doesn't know to what end and he doesn't ask, and so complete is his break with his previous self that I still can't tell if he recognizes her from the time they brushed past one another on a train in England, another world ago. "I have my orders and I must obey them. And it's better that you should obey them, too." She is the Countess Alexandra Adraxine née Vladinoff (Dietrich), a government minister's brilliant daughter married to a military fool who left her widowed within weeks of war's outbreak; we have been tracing her glittering life in parallel with Peter's troubles, her presentation at court, her wedding, the luxuries of her husband's estate where she awakes one eerie autumn morning to discover its opulent halls and stairs and lawns as still and deserted as a museum, as if time has moved on and left her like a snow-ghost of empire in its wake, at least until the peasants with rifles and pitchforks arrive. She's shell-shocked, Peter's under glass. Neither of them is who they used to be. The viewer may expect them to fall in love, thrown together by the lawlessness of their journey which begins with an absence of trains and goes on to include hiding under leaves, changing uniforms with the dead, and riding the rails with crowds of the dispossessed; I did not expect the turn of the countess and the revolutionary becoming refugees, fleeing the chaos of Red and White Armies equally in hopes of just making it out of the country they loved alive. If the prevailing genre around them is romance, their chances aren't dreadful, but history—Russian history not excepted—is more equivocal.
Knight Without Armour began life as a novel by James Hilton, published like his best-seller Lost Horizon in 1933; its film adaptation was produced by Alexander Korda, scripted in turn by Frances Marion, Lajos Biró, and Arthur Wimperis, and lyrically photographed by Harry Stradling; in other words I do not believe anyone actually Russian was involved in the production unless you count Miklós Rózsa's incorporation of themes from Tchaikovsky into the score. It is an English vision of Russian history through a filter of French poetic realism. I was struck nonetheless by its even-handedness which doesn't feel like a cop-out. Especially with the attractive Alexandra as co-protagonist, it would be easy to play the Bolsheviks as a jumped-up bloodthirsty mob, all sympathy for the aristos and none for the workers of the world. After all, the White Russians had the émigré glamour in the West; the Reds were the bomb-throwers, the rabble-rousers, and they had no sense of humor to boot. (The Green Army, the Black Guards, and other factions of the civil war collectively feature as Sir Not Appearing in This Film.) When we finally meet an enclave of White soldiers, however genteelly their officers may dress and speak, they register almost as caricatures of callous nobility, toasting the daughter of General Vladinoff with champagne while outside the eager staccato of a machine gun chews its way through another line of Red prisoners, cursorily tried and condemned with the exact boredom of the Bolsheviks who will retake the town in a day or so and stand their own, White prisoners up against the wall. The uniforms change on the soldiers in the town square, but the music they play to entertain themselves barely does. "Shall I tell you a great secret?" a drunken delegate (Miles Malleson) confides to Peter. "Soldiers are soldiers. White or Red, there's no difference. They can order you about, but what can they do? Shoot, kill, destroy!" There is an ironically double-edged quality to the alliance, then romance between Alexandra and Peter: they can shelter safely with neither side. I suppose it saves the film from ultimately having to pick a side, even symbolically, but I feel all the same that it gives a slight advantage to the Reds. Peter originally got in trouble for criticizing the Tsarist state, don't forget, and that was before his Bolshevik days. Axelstein who ran what that state viewed as a terrorist cell makes an honest and responsible commissar, actively opposed to wanton destruction and executions on his watch. Alexandra is our sole argument for the Whites and returning her to her ostensible people does nothing but make her realize how much more she trusts the assistant commissar of Khalinsk who sat all night with her in a deserted train station patrolled by a war-maddened stationmaster swinging his lantern at invisible, imaginary trains ("Trains that are seen are being blown up") and recited Browning's "Prospice" in his hushed lift of a voice when she couldn't sleep. For the record, although he admits to an Oxford education, Peter never does reclaim his British identity; it's a gun Chekhov threw in the river. It's one of the unexpected elements that makes me like the movie far more than I usually like romances, although it does not hurt that Donat and Dietrich have spellbinding chemistry, all the more effective because it builds through mutual kindness and life-saving that finally flashes over to breathless tenderness: "Were you thinking—that I wouldn't come back—for you?"
It is also possible that I am writing about this film because of John Clements, who steals his eleven o'clock scenes so hard that while his screentime totals perhaps fifteen minutes, I don't blame the movie for shipping him with both protagonists for most of it. Previously I had seen the actor only in The Four Feathers (1939), where I enjoyed but am beginning to think I underrated him. Behind his makeshift desk at the train station at Kazan, he looks like just another young fanatic hunting counterrevolutionaries in his black leather coat and his СССР armband; it is curious that he seems to permit our protagonists to advance their lie of traveling as siblings when his older, more cynically eager partner pushes for their arrest—White sympathizers and unaffiliated bourgeoisie are being executed within earshot as they speak—but he can't be all that careless when he insists on escorting them personally to the authorities in Samara, a full day's journey starting at night. In the rattling privacy of the train compartment, with his soldier's astrakhan hat pulled off and some of his official, impersonal authority with it, he has dark curling hair and a thin elastic face that ridges up on both sides when he smiles; it is a swift and shyly sly smile, as gravely daring as a flirtation. "There can never be truth without trust," he observes. "You, for instance, don't trust me. Obviously not." Modestly, he gives them the upper hand, acknowledging his collusion in their pretense without requiring them to confirm it; he busies himself rolling a cigarette and then with a lick of the paper glances suddenly, boldly from Alexandra's face to Peter's. Last night in a swaying slice of windowlight he watched the supposed brother chastely, passionately kiss his supposed sister's hand. "Don't let's admit anything. I don't really care who you are." Some hours and a veritable picnic of tinned foods and brandy later, everyone is sprawled around the compartment and it is becoming clear that whatever else brisk, droll, absurdly young Commissar Poushkoff may be, he's fragile. Far from a collective cog in the Revolution machine, he is exactly the sort of sensitive, highly strung individual who decorated the romantic novels of nineteenth-century Russia, and he's heading for exactly their sort of crack-up. Perhaps it's the shock of Alexandra's beauty, which is after all as sharply ethereal as Dietrich's own; perhaps it's the intimacy between her and Peter, so deep and so easy that they don't even need to touch to be in communion; perhaps he just couldn't take another day of having frightened, ordinary strangers dragged out behind the train station and shot for knowing the wrong people or having the wrong job. Either way, in a desperately gauche and touching gesture he does not quite manage to kiss Alexandra's hand and collapses in convulsive sobs, hoarse and racking as if his heart's being pulled up by the roots. At her concerned touch, he tries to pull himself together, gasping with excruciating correctness, "I most humbly beg your pardon. I don't know what you must think of me, behaving like this. The brandy—I'm not used to it—" but Alexandra's already soothing his hair with one hand and the next minute Peter has joined them, laying a steady hand of his own on the commissar's shaking shoulder. "It's quite understandable," he says gently. "We've all been through a great strain." And the scene fades out on the two of them all but curled around the young commissar who presses his mouth to Alexandra's hand as she caresses his hair and Peter holds them both and I am sorry, my slash goggles are only marginally more evolved than my gaydar and even I think the film wouldn't kick all three of them out of bed for eating crackers. That evening in Samara, he talks inconsequentially of the attractions of the region and then shows them a way out, which he cannot follow. I have gathered that the British moviegoing public of eighty years ago was as struck by Clements' performance as I was. I hope I have done my part to ensure his appreciation in the present day.
I don't say that this movie is flawless. It takes off once Donat and Dietrich are sharing a screen, but it needs a map and a flashlight to find its way out of the first act and after taking its legitimately epic time through several cataclysms of the early twentieth century it ends as suddenly as if its director realized he was making a pre-Code. I am unconvinced that some of Alexandra's costumes were the height of fashion in 1917 as opposed to 1937 and while in general I approve of actors using their native accents in foreign settings, there's one scene near the end where it might actually make a difference what language they're speaking and Knight Without Armour's English-only policy means I can't tell. I should also admit that it took me more of the film than I would have liked to get used to Feyder's directing style, which seems to favor short scenes that layer together to delicate, then sweeping effect; it's not really choppy, but it can feel that way until sufficient critical mass has been attained. It caught me anyway. It's a beautifully crowded and intimate film, a kind of hallucinatory travelogue with dirt and dust on its face; I believe its romance and I believe the reawakening that's part of it and I am sure that more politically acute films have been made about the Russian Civil War, but this one reminded me occasionally of short stories by Mikhail Bulgakov, so it must have done something right. It catches the surging bewilderment of a country in day-to-day, if not minute-to-minute upheaval, and never loses sight of the human faces its camera snags on, a documentary illusion that lends its crowd scenes specificity as well as scale. (There is one scene involving the stopping of a train that I almost can't believe David Lean didn't steal.) Dietrich is human-sized and no less luminous for it, Donat looks startlingly good in an ushanka, if anyone ever filmed Clements reading the phone book I am probably about to try to track it down. This metamorphosis brought to you by my revolutionary backers at Patreon.
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I would love to see this film on film. Dietrich looks like that often, and so does Donat, and so does much of their world, the hard, wild, transient parts of it mostly, which is wonderful.
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I saw Karl Johnson in an Amadeus at the Old Vic in 1999. He was playing a supporting part; I had no way of knowing that in about a dozen years he would become important to me; I was distracted in any case by David Suchet and to a lesser degree Michael Sheen. I know that I saw him, and I have a flicker of memory of his face because it was interesting, but that's all. Nothing about his performance, his voice, his movement. Sometimes that's how it goes.
The standout performance in that particular production came (implausibly) from the actor playing Malcolm- a young man called Tom Courtenay
I can see how that happened.
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I also saw him first in The Thirty-Nine Steps! I have since seen him in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), The Citadel (1938), and Perfect Strangers (1945). He's been good in all of them, but I really loved him here.
I think his wikipedia article mentions that he was almost dropped from Knight Without Armour when his chronic ill-health delayed filming, but that Dietrich threatened to quit if the producers threw her co-star under the bus. Good for her.
Agreed!
(My personal favorite fun fact about Robert Donat: like Leslie Howard with whom he was often classed as a romantic hero, he came at his quintessential Englishness from a slight angle; his father was a Polish immigrant, hence the last name. I think a lot of quintessential people come from the edges. It looks very different if you just inherit a thing without thinking about it.)
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*even though they don't feature.
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Thank you! I really liked the film it turned out to be.
I'm impelled first to try to find out who are the Green Army and the Black Guards* and then to find the film and absolutely immerse myself in it.
That is immensely gratifying for me to hear. Enjoy!
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Thank you! It wasn't even that I had low expectations for the movie; I just didn't expect the kind of movie it actually was and I loved it.